Hey, Lindsay, I'm good.

How are you?

Good, good, happy to be on the mic.

I have a question for you today.

Okay.

So do you tend to organize things in alphabetical order?

I mean, you just moved into a new home.

Do you go and organize your cereal boxes according to the alphabet?

No way.

I do not have time for alphabetical order.

I suppose maybe one day, but I'm not that particular about ordering things.

Now, if for something at work, I was filing things or really needed to be in alphabetical order, that's different, but certainly not in my personal life.

What about you?

No, nothing in my life is in alphabetical order.

I can't think of a single thing.

It is too much work, Michelle, and I don't have the time. Yeah.

So today we are going to answer a question from a listener.

This question comes to us from YouTube.

Yes, I'll go ahead and read the question.

So the listener says, what an interesting topic.

I was wondering what the difference is between alphabet and number.

Okay, so it's kind of a broad question, right?

So we're gonna answer it, and then we're gonna go into, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper, and we're gonna give you some expressions with the word alphabet and with the word number.

So that's the direction that we're gonna take this question in today.

So it's a good question.

Yeah, we get a lot of great questions on YouTube.

So guys, don't forget that our show is very much on YouTube.

So if you go over to, yeah, very much so.

If you go over to YouTube and type in All Ears English Podcast, we will come up.

You can hit that subscribe button.

You can ask your question inside the comments.

We do have a team member that goes in to get your questions, and that will end up, your question will end up in our list, all right?

So ask your question over on YouTube.

All right, perfect.

All right, so Lindsay, what's the difference between alphabet and number?

Okay, so alphabet is the product of all the letters known as the ABCs, right?

And number is just one, two, three, 67, 12, 114.

Yeah, exactly.

So interestingly enough, this was one thing I hadn't, I guess I hadn't thought about before.

Alphabet really encompasses all of the letters, but is there a word that encompasses all of the numbers?

A word that, just the numerical system, I guess, right?

Right, exactly, but we don't really say that.

I guess it's because there are only 26 letters and there are infinite numbers.

Yeah, no, we don't have, no, we don't have any kind of word that would say.

Right, it's just numbers.

So it would be alphabet and the numbers.

So, but we're gonna talk about that more.

But alphabet, think ABCs, numbers, think one, two, three.

And one thing you should do right now is hit follow wherever you're listening to the All Ears English podcast so you never miss anything from us.

Yeah, guys, hit that follow button wherever you are.

Make sure you are fully following us so you get every episode, all right?

So what are we diving into then today?

How are we going to answer this question?

Well, we are gonna get more into it because I realized there are a lot of useful expressions that go along with the words alphabet and the word number.

And so I thought this was a really good opportunity to teach some of those.

So we're gonna start with alphabet.

So the first one is, we already went over it.

Lindsay, what is it?

Yeah, so just alphabetical order, right?

I asked you at the top of the show, do you alphabetize?

That's a great verb, by the way.

Alphabetize, do you alphabetize your cereal boxes?

And you laughed and said, no way, who does that, right?

And here's another example, alphabetical order.

Her last name is Zane and the class had to line up in alphabetical order so she was last, okay. Yeah, I always wondered what that was like, right?

Because I feel like in school, kids often got called on for different things according to their last name.

Yeah, it seemed to happen a lot for some reason.

And I was always in the middle and you too, I guess, right?

Kind of in the middle-ish.

And so that was kind of nice because you're not caught off guard.

You're not, I don't know, volunteered for something all of a sudden that you don't know what's going on.

That's true, you're kind of cozied in to the rest of it.

You have time to figure out what's happening and how to respond, yeah.

That's funny, I didn't think about that.

But yeah, alphabetical order, so the order in which the alphabet goes and a lot of times that does happen in school.

A lot of times I would say by last name.

By last name, yes, completely.

What else, Michelle, what's another one?

All right, alphabet soup.

This is fun.

This is fun, yeah.

So alphabet soup, it's like something that doesn't make sense.

It's too much information maybe and it just, everything is kind of all bleh, right?

Yeah, this is interesting.

What is a scenario when you might use this to say something is alphabet soup?

I would say when you're being given directions for something, maybe that just doesn't make sense or you're saying that sounds like alphabet or maybe, oh, maybe someone's trying to give you some sort of explanation as to why something happened but you're just thinking that sounds like alphabet soup.

It's kind of, it just doesn't, it doesn't add up, it doesn't work, there's too much, it's all jumbled, right?

Interesting, yeah, and so the sample sentence is just alphabet soup.

It's completely nonsensical.

And this is a good high-level bonus word for our listeners today, nonsensical.

Nonsensical, instead of saying it doesn't make sense, you can say it's nonsensical.

And yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Oh, no, I was just thinking, it's this idea, I think it comes from this idea of, did you ever have alphabet soup, Lindsay?

Yeah, sure, it's the can of soup that has all the ABC, all the letters of the alphabet as instead of SpaghettiOs, right?

Or I don't know, what is it?

Spaghetti, I don't know.

Tell us what it is, Michelle.

Well, yeah, I mean, no, it's exactly what Lindsay said.

It's just you have all the letters in a soup.

So I guess the idea is, of course, when you have all the letters in a soup, they're not gonna be lined up perfectly.

They're jumbled in this soup.

So that's, to me, what I think of when I hear this expression, alphabet soup.

It's also kind of what it feels like to travel, let's say, for example, in Asia, like in Japan, if you don't read kanji, it feels like that.

Let's say trying to read the subway map.

Luckily, it's actually quite good.

The Tokyo subway system, they do a good job of putting subway stops in Romaji, which you can read the letters, right?

Like an R is an R, right?

But it just feels like that when you come into contact with the Japanese language.

For me, it feels like alphabet soup sometimes, especially reading.

It's just chaotic.

Well, I remember in Tokyo, it was great with the train system because I remember sometimes people were just working there to point you in the right direction.

You would just say the train you were looking for and people would point and it was so nice.

And it's like, oh no, in New York.

Maybe New York is really the alphabet soup, right?

Yeah, and because you might have someone sitting at the stand, but usually you get in there and there's no one actually there.

Usually, we used to say on the show, it's the lady yelling at you from inside the booth, right?

It's like.

Or on the train, they yell at you too.

The conductor yells at you on the train.

If you hold the doors or something.

Right, right, right.

It's a real treat, yeah.

So different, nothing could be more different than the New York City subway and the Tokyo Metro, right?

Absolutely, so all right.

The last one for alphabet expressions is the ABCs of something.

So it's the basics.

So I'm so glad to be your personal trainer.

Let's first go over the ABCs of all the gym equipment.

So you're not actually saying, let's go over something that starts with A.

Let's find a piece of equipment that starts with B.

You're not doing that.

It's just saying, oh, these are the basics.

Yep, it's just another colorful, fun way to say the basics.

I would say it's not super common.

It's a little playful, right?

If you're just trying to mix it up and say something different, but we're giving you guys some variety here, right? Yeah, yeah.

So we've talked about what we've tried to learn that feels like alphabet soup.

I mean, also for me, Arabic, trying to read Arabic felt like alphabet soup when I tried to learn Arabic a few years ago to get ready to go to Cairo.

Yeah, anything else, Michelle?

Ooh, sometimes, let's see.

Well, I mean, sometimes certain politicians might say something that sounds like alphabet soup.

I'm not naming any names.

We don't get into it, but yeah.

Yeah, a lot of things can.

Or maybe reading food labels.

Ooh, talking about processed foods in the US.

Oh yeah, we've talked about that.

Okay, there's a good one.

When you go into the US, pick up your average product on American shelves, it's gonna be alphabet soup if you look at the ingredients because there's way too many ingredients.

All right, I was just last night reading ingredients.

Yep, there you go, all right.

That's a good example, I love it.

Okay, here we go, Michelle.

Let's go into numbers now, right?

All right, what do we have to say about this?

Well, in the same way we have alphabetical order, there's also numerical order.

So the program will automatically put everything in numerical order, so no need to do it manually.

Yes, or I actually love this expression.

It's a numbers game.

Yeah, me too.

And we could, you're right, we could do a whole episode on this, and I think we will, so hit the follow button, guys.

I wanna go more into this.

But basically the idea is, there's a lot of chance in life, right?

So for example, it's a numbers game.

Just keep trying and eventually you'll get the right answer.

This is why people go to Vegas and spend all their money.

Yeah, I really like this expression as well.

So yeah, well, maybe soon we'll do a follow-up and we'll just really dig into this one.

Yeah, let's do that.

Give it the amount of time it deserves, but it's a very good one.

For sure, what else, Michelle?

Anything else?

A numbers person.

So that's someone who is good at numbers.

You don't say, I'm a letters person, right?

You don't actually, no, that's interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, and just to be clear, to remind everybody, letters make up the alphabet.

So numbers, but again, we don't have a alphabet word for numbers.

Right, right, right.

Okay, so a numbers person, someone who's good at numbers.

I am not a numbers person, thank goodness for calculators.

Lindsay, are you a numbers person?

No, what do you think, Michelle?

Well, no, not naturally.

I've had to get a little bit more numbery, kind of running the business, running spreadsheets, but I still don't know how to run the spreadsheets.

You know, I still, I know how to sum columns, but that's pretty much it.

So, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know, do you ever have a friend, like Dan is very good at kind of fast math.

And he'll just, he'll always know how to calculate, you know, the algebra for something.

If we're trying to calculate something, he'll be able to do it quickly.

And I just kind of nod along, because I did like math in school, but just to do it quickly like that, and think of how I'm going to figure out some sort of formula, not my strength.

Well, I think that's the cool thing about being an adult, being out of school.

We get to choose where we want to focus our energy and our career.

And there are a lot of careers where you don't really need to come in contact with numbers on that level, right?

So that's a good thing, thank goodness.

But if you're an accountant, then we want you to be good at numbers, right?

For sure.

For sure. So should we do a role play?

Yeah, let's do it.

So here we are classmates, and we're working on a project, all right?

Okay.

Okay, so the professor wants everything in alphabetical order.